The NSF Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Committee hosts the 2018 Blackwell-Tapia Conference and Awards Ceremony. This is the ninth conference since 2000, held every other year, with the location rotating among NSF Mathematics Institutes. The conference and prize honors David Blackwell, the first African-American member of the National Academy of Science, and Richard Tapia, winner of the National Medal of Science in 2010, two seminal figures who inspired a generation of African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in mathematics. The Blackwell-Tapia Prize recognizes a mathematician who has contributed significantly to research in his or her area of expertise, and who has served as a role model for mathematical scientists and students from underrepresented minority groups, or has contributed in other significant ways to addressing the problem of underrepresentation of minorities in math.

The 2018 recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize is Dr. Ronald E. Mickens, the Distinguished Fuller E. Callaway Professor in the Department of Physics at Clark Atlanta University.

The conference will include scientific talks, poster presentations, panel discussions, ample opportunities for networking, and the awarding of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize. Participants are invited from all career stages and will represent institutions of all sizes across the country, including Puerto Rico.

The Mathematical Sciences Diversity Initiative holds a Modern Math Workshop (MMW) prior to the SACNAS National Conference each year. The 2018 MMW will be hosted by SAMSI at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, San Antonio, Texas on October 10th and 11th, 2018. This workshop is intended to encourage undergraduates, graduate students and recent PhDs from underrepresented minority groups to pursue careers in the mathematical sciences and build research and mentoring networks. The Modern Math Workshop is a pre-conference event at the SACNAS National Conference. The MMW includes a keynote lecture, mini-courses, research talks, a question and answer session and a reception.

The purpose of the summer school is to introduce graduate students to state-of-the-art methods and results in Hamiltonian systems and symplectic geometry. We focus on recent developments on the study of chaotic motion in Hamiltonian systems and its applications to models in Celestial Mechanics.

Harmonic analysis is a central field of mathematics with a number of applications to geometry, partial differential equations, probability, and number theory, as well as physics, biology, and engineering. The Graduate Summer School will feature mini-courses in geometric measure theory, homogenization, localization, free boundary problems, and partial differential equations as they apply to questions in or draw techniques from harmonic analysis. The goal of the program is to bring together students and researchers at all levels interested in these areas to share exciting recent developments in these subjects, stimulate further interactions, and inspire the new generation to pursue research in harmonic analysis and its applications.

The image of a large sphere isometrically embedded into a small space through a C^1 embedding. (Attributions: E. Bartzos, V. Borrelli, R. Denis, F. Lazarus, D. Rohmer, B. Thibert)

This two week summer school will introduce graduate students to the theory of h-principles.  After building up the theory from basic smooth topology, we will focus on more recent developments of the theory, particularly applications to symplectic and contact geometry, and foliation theory.

Explore Outstanding Phenomena in Animal Behavior

Jointly hosted by Janelia and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), this program will bring together 15-20 advanced PhD students with complementary expertise who are interested in working at the interface of mathematics and biology. Emphasis will be placed on linking behavior to neural dynamics and exploring the coupling between these processes and the natural sensory environment of the organism. The aim is to educate a new type of global scientist that will work collaboratively in tackling complex problems in cellular, circuit and behavioral biology by combining experimental and computational techniques with rigorous mathematics and physics.

The MSRI-UP summer program is designed to serve a diverse group of undergraduate students who would like to conduct research in the mathematical sciences.

In 2018, MSRI-UP will focus on the core role of (linear) algebra in current research and application areas of Data Science ranging from unsupervised learning, clustering and networks, to algebraic signal processing and feature extraction, to the central role linear algebra plays in deep machine learning.  The research program will be led by Dr. David Uminsky, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of San Francisco.

Higher categorical structures and homotopy methods have made significant influence on geometry in recent years. This summer school is aimed at transferring these ideas and fundamental technical tools to the next generation of mathematicians.

The summer school will focus on the following four topics:  higher categorical structures in geometry, derived geometry, factorization algebras, and their application in physics.  There will be eight to ten mini courses on these topics, including mini courses led by Chirs Brav, Kevin Costello, Jacob Lurie, and Ezra Getzler. The prerequisites will be kept at a minimum, however, a introductory courses in differential geometry, algebraic topology and abstract algebra are recommended.

This Summer Graduate School will introduce students to the modern theory of the  inhomogeneous Cauchy-Riemann equation, the fundamental partial differential equation of Complex Analysis. This theory uses powerful tools of partial differential equations, differential geometry and functional analysis to obtain a refined understanding of holomorphic functions on complex manifolds. Besides students planning to work in complex analysis, this course will be valuable to those planning to study partial differential equations, complex differential and algebraic geometry, and operator theory. The exposition will be self-contained and the prerequisites will be kept at a minimum

The Infinite Possibilities Conference (IPC) is a national conference that is designed to promote, educate, encourage and support women of color interested in mathematics and statistics, as a step towards addressing the underrepresentation of African-Americans, Latinas, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders in these fields. 

IPC aims to:

• fulfill a need for role models and community-building
• provide greater access to information and resources for success in graduate school and beyond
• raise awareness of factors that can support or impede underrepresented women in the mathematical sciences

A unique gathering, the conference brings together participants from across the country, at all stages of education and career, for mentoring and mathematics.

On March 8-10, 2018, IPAM will host a conference showcasing the achievements of Latinx in the mathematical sciences. The goal of the conference is to encourage Latinx to pursue careers in the mathematical sciences, to promote the advancement of Latinx currently in the discipline, to showcase research being conducted by Latinx at the forefront of their fields, and, finally, to build a community around shared academic interests. The conference will be held on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, CA. It will begin at noon on Thursday, March 8.

This conference is sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative, with funding from the National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences.

Our mathematics education system is inequitable. It operates in ways that leave a significant proportion of students with negative mathematics experiences and inadequate mathematical preparation. The problem is historical and systemic, and the students most disaffected by the current system are overwhelmingly Black and Latino, Indigenous, poor, women, immigrant or first generation college students. If our mathematics community is to sustainably grow and thrive, mathematics education at all levels must be transformed.

This workshop focuses on students for whom we do not yet successfully ensure access to and advancement in mathematics. Sessions will share relevant programmatic efforts and innovative research that have been shown to maintain or increase students’ engagement and interests in mathematics across k-12, undergraduate and graduate education. The sessions will focus particularly on reproducible efforts that affirm those students’ identities and their diverse intellectual resources and lived experiences. These efforts at various levels of mathematics education will highlight ways in which meaningful experiences in mathematics can disrupt ongoing systemic oppression. Participants will leave with conceptual and practical ways to open up and elevate mathematics education where all students thrive.

Group Photo

As part of the Mathematical Sciences Collaborative Diversity Initiatives, nine mathematics institutes are pleased to offer their annual SACNAS pre-conference event, the 2017 Modern Math Workshop (MMW). The Modern Math Workshop is intended to encourage minority undergraduates to pursue careers in the mathematical sciences and to assist undergraduates, graduate students and recent PhDs in building their research networks. The Modern Math Workshop is part of the SACNAS National Conference; the workshop and the conference take place in the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. The MMW starts at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, October 18 with registration beginning at noon.

The summer school will be an introduction to the more algebraic aspects of the theory of automorphic forms and representations. One of the goals will be to understand the statements of the main conjectures in the Langlands programme. Another will be to gain a good working understanding of the fundamental definitions in the theory, such as principal series representations, the Satake isomorphism, and of course automorphic forms and representations for groups such as GL_n and its inner forms.

The purpose of the summer school is to introduce graduate students to the recent developments in the area of dispersive partial differential equations (PDE), which have received a great deal of attention from mathematicians, in part due to ubiquitous applications to nonlinear optics, water wave theory and plasma physics.

Recently remarkable progress has been made in understanding existence and uniqueness of solutions to nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) and KdV equations, and properties of those solutions. We will outline the basic tools that were developed to address these questions. Also we will present some of recent results on derivation of NLS equations from quantum many particle systems and will discuss how methods developed to study the NLS can be relevant in the context of the derivation of this nonlinear equation.

McMullen’s g-Conjecture from 1970 is a shining example of mathematical foresight that combined all results available at that time to conjure a complete characterization of face numbers of convex simple/simplicial polytopes. The key statement in its verification is that certain combinatorial numbers associated to geometric (or topological) objects are non-negative. The aim of this workshop is to introduce graduate students to selected contemporary topics in geometric combinatorics with an emphasis on positivity questions. It is fascinating that the dual notions of simple and simplicial polytopes lead to different but equally powerful algebraic frameworks to treat such questions. A key feature of the lectures will be the simultaneous development of these algebraic frameworks from complementary perspectives: combinatorial-topological and convex-geometric.  General concepts (such as Lefschetz elements, Hodge–Riemann–Minkowski inequalities) will be developed side-by-side, and analogies will be drawn to concepts in algebraic geometry, Fourier analysis, rigidity theory and measure theory. This allows for entry points for students with varying backgrounds.  The courses will be supplemented with guest lectures highlighting further connections to other fields.

The theory of dynamical systems has witnessed very significant developments in the last decades, includi​n​g the work of two 2014 Fields medalists, Artur Avila and Maryam Mirzakhani. ​The school will concentrate on the recent significant developments in the field of dynamical systems and present some of the present main streams of research. Two central themes will be those of partial hyperbolicity on one side, and rigidity, group actions and renormalization on the other side.​ ​Other themes will ​include homogeneous dynamics and geometry and dynamics on infinitely flat surfaces (both providing connections to the work of Maryam Mirzakhani), topological dynamics, thermodynamical formalism, singularities and bifurcations in analytic dynamical systems.  

We will give an introduction to categorical representation theory, focusing on the example of Soergel bimodules, which is a categorification of the Iwahori-Hecke algebra. We will give a comprehensive introduction to the "tool box" of modern (higher) representation theory: diagrammatics, homotopy categories, categorical diagonalization, module categories, Drinfeld center, algebraic Hodge theory.